AN ENCOUNTER AT JACOB’S WELLReading: John 4: 1-26
‘If only we had known! If only you knew!’ How many times have we thought or spoken those words? The ‘if onlys’ in life can act either as a prison where we are held locked in regrets, even remorse or as a spur to pursue and to choose life over against mere existence. This encounter in John’s Gospel is another time when God (Jesus) makes himself little and vulnerable. He acknowledges his thirst, but, as always, that openness has a purpose. It is going to lead to bridge-building, to dialogue, to healing, to the recognition on the part of one marginalized, erring and broken person that she is accepted, beloved and beautiful. Not only that, but this encounter is going to have far-reaching consequences.
Jesus, so John tells us, had to go through Samaria. I have the sense that this was a journey and a meeting destined from all eternity. On a more superficial level, the easiest way to get home to Galilee was to travel this way, but beyond that, at a deeper level, there was someone living in the town of Sychar who needed to be shown the way ‘home.’ This story is about many things, but one of the most obvious is of Jesus fearlessly crossing boundaries, the border between two peoples, Samaritans and Jews who traditionally hated each other and would take nothing to do with each other, the border between men and women, borders of politics, religion, gender, culture, tradition, all were crossed in this one meeting.
Jesus knew all about this woman before the dialogue even started. She knew nothing about him. She was caught in two-dimensional thinking. What she daily experienced in the humdrum and degrading situations of her lifestyle was all there was. She is utterly shocked, first of all, to be spoken to by this stranger, a Jew, and, secondly, to be asked for a drink of water. It went totally beyond her conditioning. It was then that Jesus came in with his ‘if only.’ “If only you knew the gift God has for you and who I am, you would ask me and I would give you living water.” The woman was still on the two dimensional level, thinking about buckets and ropes and the impossibility of being offered better water than that from Jacob’s well.
The well of hurt and brokenness in this woman was very deep, but Jesus digs deeper through all the layers of cultural, religious and political allegiance and personal shame and guilt and touches the spring of life within her in such a way that she knows herself restored, healed, forgiven. It is to her that Jesus first reveals who he really is – and she becomes such an authentic bearer of good news to the rest of her community. She who has been rejected by life now becomes the vessel to bear living water to others.
We rely on so many things to quench our thirst for belonging, acceptance and love, so much so that our traditions, our culture, our religion, our gender, our ‘ancestors’ can become god for us. We see things through our particular cultural lenses and don’t see the greater reality. In the end, all these things are secondary to the God who seeks those who will worship him in spirit and in truth. They are often found in unexpected places and among unexpected people, among the little ones of the earth, among the unorthodox, the poor.
Nearly all the major conflicts in the world are over land, religion, traditions. When all the fighting is over we still ‘have to go through Samaria, to pick our way back across the rubble and the corpses of the chaos we have created, to dialogue with the God who offers living water, who is Spirit, and who points out to us the way that leads to home.